


Fic Snippets: The One Where Bucky Is A Raptor

by ffoulkes_no



Category: Captain America (Movies), Dinotopia - James Gurney, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dinotopia AU, Gen, I REGRET NOTHING, MCU AU, forever incomplete
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26719243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ffoulkes_no/pseuds/ffoulkes_no
Summary: Ten years ago, Bucky found a small, half-dead human washed up on the shore. For some reason, he didn't eat it.He regrets that decision every day of his life.
Kudos: 5





	1. Waterfall City, 1943

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited bits of whole crack.
> 
> Breathe deep, seek peace, and don't take your eyes off your pet human for even one fucking second--

After registering himself in the official record books, only ten years late, Steve ends up wandering the downtown area alone. Even though he knew the chances were slim, he'd checked through every dolphinback arrival since he'd figured he'd first washed up. But he still comes away disappointed.  
  
Bucky had gone off earlier to see the Hall of Science, assuming Steve would join him once he was done. Steve decides the slow, early-morning merchant district is better than the main thoroughfares, and he intends to find a secluded bit of greenery to hide in and let his emotions out. Most of the shops look lazy, not seeing the bulk of their customers until after breakfast and even lunch, but there's a small crowd gathered around a table set out in front of something that advertises itself as "Antiques and Oddities."  
  
Steve lets his curiosity get the better of him.  
  
There are three people behind the table-- two saurians and a human --entertaining the crowd with stories. Tales of adventure and excitement, and a noble cause that needs to be done. Steve is immediately taken, and stops to listen, momentarily forgetting about the heaviness in his heart. The human, a dark-haired woman with a serious expression but a smile that reminds him of Bernie, on a hunt, explains their purpose: They're in Waterfall City to recruit for the overland escorts that help caravans pass across the Rainy Basin. There's been more trouble than normal, and they need extra help.  
  
One of the saurians, a large, heavyset ankylosaur, sees Steve's furrowed brow and concentrating expression. "You thinkin' about it, kid? There's plenty of adventure to keep a pup like you busy."  
  
"You said the caravans were in danger," Steve says, looking between each of them. "I know the Basin. I can help."  
  
The other saurian, a long, thin _Edmontosaurus_ , makes a surprised honk. "Forgive me," he says, "but _you_ know the Basin?"  
  
"Let me guess," says the ankylosaur, "you took a caravan, once, think you got a feel for it."  
  
Steve's expression turns defiant. "I've lived there," he says, snapping his teeth the way Bucky does, when he's annoyed, "for years."  
  
The human woman is looking at him with interest. "We could certainly use someone who knows the area. Things are not what they seem, and experience could mean all the difference."  
  
Steve signs his name with only a small bit of difficulty. He'd had trouble, earlier, when he tried to write in Ela's records, but his brain seems more keen, now that it's had time to roost on it.  
  
  
  
He meets Bucky back at the hotel.  
  
Bucky is preening, peevish, when he enters the room. Steve had been excited to tell Bucky about the caravans, and what he'd signed up for, but it all grinds to a sudden halt when the only greeting Steve gets is a low, throaty growl.  
  
"Shit," Steve curses.  
  
Bucky glares and makes a pointed gesture of tucking his head under his wing.  
  
"Buck, I'm sorry, I got... distracted." The last of the escorts' excitement drifts from his mind, replaced by Bucky waiting for him all afternoon, and then what had happened at the library. The entire day suddenly feels like a net loss, and he decides he'd be better just turning in to sleep.  
  
Bucky doesn't try to groom him when he crawls into the nest. He tries a single, soft chirp, but Bucky screws his eyes shut and shoves his face deeper into his wing. Steve pulls his blanket up over his chest and tries to sleep.  
  
After what seems like forever, staring up at the ceiling, Steve hears Bucky shift.  
  
"I waited for _four hours_."  
  
"I know. I'm sorry."  
  
"Sorry don't refund tickets, Steve."  
  
"I'll pay you back."  
  
"With what? You're broke."  
  
"I'll get you a fish, next time we're at the lake."  
  
Bucky makes a soft little trill, a raptor laugh. "Yeah, okay, mighty damn hunter over here, gonna get a fish. Last time you tried, you got pulled in. That catfish would'a ate you, if Bernie hadn't been there."  
  
Steve hisses and snaps, "I would'a been fine."  
  
"Fine _food_."  
  
"Fuck you, Buck."  
  
"So, you wanna tell me why you blew me off?"  
  
Steve frowns, crossing his arms underneath the blanket. Bucky reaches over and takes a gentle mouthful of Steve's hair, running his teeth through it like he would through his own feathers. Steve sighs, relaxing, if only just a little. After a few more passes from Bucky's teeth, he says, "I didn't find my mom's name. At the library." Bucky stops grooming, and Steve can just see the light glinting off Bucky's eye in the dark. "I needed to think. It... It's different, for humans, Buck. We get upset, and we can't just wait for it to go away. It sticks around. I needed to be alone, y'know?"  
  
"Fuck, Steve. I'm sorry."  
  
"Yeah, me too."  
  
After a moment, Bucky gives a suspicious chirp. "Something tells me there's more."  
  
Steve looks over, feigning innocence. "What makes you think that?"  
  
"You always do something stupid, when you're upset." Bucky snaps his teeth, "Scratch that. You always do something stupid, and I can smell it on you." Steve feels Bucky's snout jab him in the ribs. "What did you do."  
  
"Ow! Hey! I didn't do _anything_ stupid!"  
  
"And now you're lying," Bucky puts his mouth around Steve's middle in a false threat display. "What did you do?"  
  
Steve wriggles, half-hearted, "Nothing _bad_ \--"  
  
Bucky growls.  
  
Steve bites him on the wing, useless with his human teeth, even if he'd intended to actually put force into it. Still, Bucky pulls back and stares at him in the dark. Steve huffs, defiantly snapping his teeth, as if he'd won an actual fight.  
  
"I joined up with some escorts going across the Basin."  
  
"You _what_."  
  
"C'mon, Buck, it's not that bad..."  
  
"You're going to _die_ , you dipshit!"  
  
"What? No! We know the Basin! We live there!"  
  
Bucky snarls, "We know the Western Basin, and we _barely_ live there! How many times have we almost died?"  
  
"The carnotaurs were a _mistake_ \--"  
  
"How many times have we almost _starved_? We aren't a pair of tyrannosaurs living off our teeth. We're two losers who've gotten by on _sheer dumb luck_ , and Bernie keeping us safe. And now you think we'd make it off on our own in the middle of nowhere?"  
  
Steve blinks. " _We?_ "  
  
Steve can feel Bucky's growl in his chest. "Do you think I'd let you do something this _ridiculously stupid_ on your own?"  
  
"I, well..."  
  
"You are the dumbest food I have ever met. I should have eaten you."  
  
"You would have choked."  
  
"And then I wouldn't be here, having to make stupid decisions just to keep my _even stupider food_ safe."  
  
Steve trills.  
  
Bucky hisses at him, then folds a wing over his shoulder.  
  
"Go the fuck to sleep."


	2. Canyon City, 1947

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Stark is a Stark is a Stark.

Every few months, _something_ has been dropping out of the sky, and causing havok where it lands.  
  
Redwing collects some of the larger pieces for Steve and Bucky to look at. They're definitely worked metal, but not old enough to be from Poseidos. And they're rusted, which Poseidos' metal doesn't do. It's a bit beyond either of them.  
  
Steve says that a friend of Peggy's, Professor Erskine, might be able to look at them. But he's all the way back in Waterfall City -- at least a month's travel by foot.  
  
Sam offers to take them there, himself. His wingsuit is faster than even a Skybax, and he knows the best route over the Forbidden Mountains. Redwing objects, and they have a good-natured argument about air currents and thermnals and other things that make Bucky and Steve's eyes glaze over.  
  
Finally, Sam wins out, and, after a good meal of duck eggs and toast, he loads the metal bits into his satchel and flies West.  
  
Sam is gone less than two days when the next unnatural meteor shower hits. Steve is jolted awake by the Skybax stable's startled screeches, and he and Bucky rush outside just in time to see a huge, bright comet-tailed _something_ streak across the sky, then impact into the far side of the canyon with a resonant _thoom_.  
  
Bucky is already running towards it when Steve manages to pull his boots on. He darts after him in the darkness, following Bucky's flockcalls more than his eyes.  
  
The crater isn't the large, circular thing they expect. Instead, it's a long smear, several hundred feet long.  
  
At the head of it, instead of jumbled wreckage, there seems to be a more-or-less intact metal egg. Parts of it seem to have sheared off, along the edges, but Steve can't spot them in the night. Bucky gives it a tentative kick with his metal claw. It remains inert. Now bold, Bucky sniffs at the top sections. They're shinier, glinting. He runs a foreclaw along them, carefully.  
  
"It's glass," Bucky says.  
  
Steve blinks, squinting, trying to see. He runs his own hand there. Sure enough, it's cold and smooth and definitely glass. A sudden desire runs through him, and he taps out Shave and a Haircut on the strange panel, laughing to himself.  
  
He makes a startled alarm call when "two bits" follows back.  
  
Bucky roars, scrabbling away, crest and tail raised in alarm.  
  
Then the weird metal egg _opens_ like a door, and something crawls out. It stands up atop the egg, staring down at them. It stays there, for a moment, a human silhouette against the dark sky, before it wobbles and collapses, hitting the dirt with a dull thud.  
  
Steve and Bucky look at eachother.  
  
What the hell.

They bring him back to their room, just off the Skybax stables, and lay him down in their nest. The man is small and thin, with dark hair and what was probably a well-groomed moustache under a few days' worth of beard. He doesn't have much on him-- an ID that Steve can just barely read, so many years out from last seeing English, a pistol, and a weird box that makes hissing sounds when Bucky presses the button on its front --and his clothes are ill-fitting in a way that makes it seem they were either given, or stolen.  
  
"Howard," Steve says, staring at the ID.  
  
Bucky makes a stuttering sound, examining the pistol with a curled lip and a distasteful expression, "That's a dumb name."  
  
"So's 'Bucky.'"  
  
Bucky snarls, raising his crest in mock aggression.  
  
Steve hisses back, snapping, and doing his best impression of a raptor displaying its feathers by holding his arms out to his sides.  
  
Both are growling like juveniles playfighting when a tired voice asks, "Hey, am I interrupting something?"  
  
Bucky manages to not startle, this time. But Steve turns and hisses out of habit.  
  
The man quirks an eyebrow.  
  
Steve looks sheepish. "Sorry, we're not... used to strangers."  
  
"Especially ones that come out of the sky."  
  
The man cocks his head, staring at Bucky, and Steve realizes, belatedly, that though Bucky understands English just fine, the man almost certainly doesn't speak Raptor.  
  
"Okay," Steve says, "I think we all have some explaining to do."  
  
The man-- Howard --manages another ten or so minutes of consciousness, pleasantly agreeable, nodding along with the hazy look of someone who probably shouldn't take another hit to the head for at least a decade, before stating, "Alright. Sounds aces. Gonna go back to sleep, now." He's out before he finishes the last sentence.  
  
  
  
He wakes up screaming.  
  
Bucky and Steve, who had been outside trying to trade one of the Skybaxes for a particularly tasty-looking fish she'd caught, come running back into the room, feathers (real and metaphorical) raised.   
  
The troodon cleaning lady, who'd come to tidy up, is up on the bookshelf, holding her broom out like a sword. Howard is just out of her reach, making the same motion with one of Steve's hiking poles.   
  
"What the hell," says Howard.  
  
"What the _fuck_ ," says Bucky.  
  
No one is sure what Steve says, but it's Irish and sounds very, very rude.  
  
Steve spends the next half-hour split between trying to calm Uli, the poor _troodon_ , down, and dealing with Howard, who alternates between rambling about how "none of this makes sense" and trying to examine Bucky like a museum specimen.  
  
Bucky is surprisingly tolerant. Steve suspects he's just as interested in Howard, and probably wants to quiz him on the weird flying egg. But Howard shows no signs of understanding Raptor or Common.  
  
After a few cycles, Howard finally calms down _a bit_ , and turns to Steve. "I need to see the XB-E."  
  
Steve blinks. "The... Hex-bee...?"  
  
"The plane! The plane I... crashed..." A dark look crosses his face, but it passes quickly. "You know, plane? Wings? Flies?"  
  
Steve remembers the egg, and how parts of it had been sheared away. "It's an airship," he says, in realization. Bucky makes a surprised chirp, cocking his head. "They're not meteors, they're _airships_!"   
  
Howard sighs, "Okay, is there something else I can talk to? An engineer? Someone who knows about _science_...?"  
  
Bucky growls. Howard's mouth snaps shut.  
  
"Your craft went down on the other side of the canyon. We can take you to it, but the wreckage is... pretty scattered. You're lucky the cabin held up as well as it did. The other ones smashed into nothing, when they hit." Steve reaches under the nest and pulls out a twisted piece of metal. It's bent nearly in half, and charred badly. He holds it out to Howard. "I hope no one was in them, when they came down."  
  
Howard takes the scrap, looking at it out of reflex. "No," he says, dumbly, "they were unmanned. I... _who are you_? And what are _these_?" He makes to point at Bucky, but Bucky snaps at his hand before it's even fully extended. "Jesus."  
  
Bucky and Steve share a look.  
  
Bucky rumbles low, "Steve, I think we have a problem."  
  
Steve chirps back, "Yep."  
  
"He's not from here."  
  
"Nope."  
  
"He's not from _here_."  
  
" _Nope._ "  
  
" _Fuck_ , Steve."  
  
"Fuck," Steve agrees.  
  
  
  
They take Howard to see the wreckage.  
  
In the daylight, it's even more obvious just how lucky Howard had been. He'd barely cleared the canyon wall. A few feet lower, he'd have smashed directly into it. A few feet higher, and he would have overshot the relative level ground at the canyon's top, tumbling down into the rocky hillside just beyond.  
  
The egg-- or, XB-E, as Howard insists it be called --is smaller than it seemed at night. Howard isn't a particularly large human, but Steve still finds himself amazed that he was able to curl himself up inside and still pilot the thing in any sort of comfort. Steve can barely fit his upper torso into the main compartment, to look around.  
  
Howard seems to pick up on his curiosity.  
  
"They weren't built for travel," Howard says, head shoved into an open panel, wires spilling out around him like innards from a fresh hunt. "They were designed as intercept vehicles, to stop attacks. The pilots weren't supposed to be in them for more than a quarter of an hour at a time. Let me tell you, even _that_ is too long. Start losing feeling in your pants real quick."  
  
Bucky, who'd been examining one of the broken wings a few yards away, makes a loud, amused trill.  
  
Howard gives him a curious look, then glances back at Steve, "Do all of them understand English?"  
  
"If they're around Humans who speak English, sure. But different people come from different places."  
  
Howard doesn't seem completely satisfied, but he's seemingly willing to wait, and goes back into the machine's guts with only a slight hesitation.  
  
"Where did you come from?" Steve asks. Howard is so far into the wires and tubing that he can't see Steve's face, but the tone is enough to make him crawl back out, again.  
  
Howard sighs, "What I've seen here, I don't know that I want to answer that." He frowns, fidgeting with a small Bakelite panel. "And the way you two are acting, I don't know that _you_ want me to answer that. Am I right?"  
  
Steve shifts, uncomfortable.  
  
Howard nods, staring down at the panel. "We all got things we..." He turns the panel over in his hand. "Huh."  
  
Bucky peeks around from the far side of the wreck, giving a questioning chirp.  
  
"The fusebox is damaged."  
  
"You did crash," Steve says.  
  
Howard shakes his head. "No, this," he says, tracing a long, rough-edged scar down one side of the little black panel, "is from a saw. And unless Bitey over there was picking through the wreckage while I was napping, I think I know how I ended up here."  
  
  
  



End file.
